Quote Originally Posted by HoreTore View Post
Horribly euro-centric.

And proving that something happened one way is no way of proving that it was the only way, as you well know.
I'm talking about Europe - and how it actually happened. The Dark Ages in Europe prove Brenus wrong - Christianity was responsible for the preservation, advancement, and dissemination, of knowledge prior to the Renaissance - it was not an impediment to it.

That's not to say it was a universal good but - to take one example - the study of anatomy was held up by scholastic adherence to Galen (who never dissected a human) when the Church had allowed the dissection of human corpses for several centuries. A clear case of the clerical authorities allowing a taboo practice in order to advance medical knowledge, and then academics quite literally refusing to look at what the Church was offering them.

Bashing Christianity as a weird anti-intellectual mysticism is an Enlightenment thing - which explains why the French do it - but it's still not justified.